At #localgovcamp this year up in Leeds, I ran a session to talk through what conditions need to be in place in order to implement a digital strategy successfully. Thinking this stuff through is important for any change programme, and it was really helpful to share experiences.

It’s a worry for the sector, to put it mildly, that there aren’t many significant digital change programmes around that aim to build digital-age operating models using internet platforms and open standards. So if you’re interested in the detail of the strategy we’ve adopted in Adur and Worthing, here are a some useful links that outline the approach we’re taking:

At the technology level, there will be plenty of different ways to do this, so we make no grand claims about our particular response to the problem. But how can more of local government move to making some big strategic decisions about the role of digital, and think about making the right level of investment?

Thinking about the right conditions

Landing and then delivering a digital/change programme in an organisation is extremely difficult. There are a lot of things that need to be in place and it’s important to consider these carefully before you set off. You really need to spend a lot of time thinking about the support and structure needed around your programme – not just at the beginning to get it off the ground, but considering the need for careful stewarding throughout, because it’s a process of continual touches on the tiller, thinking about your stakeholder needs, accepting challenges and compromises, and above all, holding the direction clearly.

Circumstances differ of course in different places – there will be special conditions to account for in your own situation, but I think there are certain things that are pretty much essential. I’ve blown a lot of energy (but learned a lot) in the past on projects that just didn’t have the support and structure around them they needed. It’s amazing how far you can get with drive and ingenuity, but it’s not enough in the end.

An honest assessment about the prevailing conditions in your organisation will save time, money and above all that valuable personal energy. If you think you are missing some essential conditions, time is better spent trying to get them in place, rather than risking proceeding without them. Let’s consider the following:

The Chief Executive must get what digital means for the organisation, and communicate the vision strongly

In Adur and Worthing we have a Chief Executive who has a strong understanding of the role of digital in enabling fundamental change. Our Catching the Wave strategy, with its themes of supporting wealth generators, promoting enterprising communities and organisational adaptation provides a strong guide for all our work, and recognizes how vital digital is across the piece. Digital is often discussed in strategic conversations at A&W – the profile is high, there is huge support and encouragement and also – the expectations are clear!

But if that’s not the case in your organisation, you really do need to work out how to land the message with them, and try to connect the their strategic vision, or their immediate pressure, with the potential for digital to help.

Digital should be at the top table

My role as Director for Digital & Resources makes me a member of the senior leadership team, which means digital is a key strand of many of our discussions – not just coming from me – everyone gets it and supports it, which is incredible. I feel this nurtured and shaped narrative ‘settles in’ to the consciousness over time. My span of control covers the resource functions, including finance and this gives the role enough ‘clout’. Given the importance of digital in our times, I think a top table role for someone with a very clear understanding of digital and the internet is critical. In time, I suspect such roles become more about public service design and digital/social infrastructure, but we’re not there yet.

You should have a good, coherent and sufficiently ambitious digital strategy

At Adur and Worthing we developed ours one step at a time, developing the thinking with external consultants Methods Digital and gaining support from members in stages through reports to committee. Here’s a list of the stages we went through.

July 2014: “ICT Position Statement” which set out the problems and opportunities, and requested funding for “discovery”
October 2014: reported findings and requested “blueprinting”
December 2014: presented the strategic programme (go to page 161) and requests for funding to be released in stages
January 2015: programme began (tech procurement and architecting)
April 2015: gateway approval from cabinet members from April
Sept 2015 : gateway approval for next phase (we hope!)

User-centred design should be at the heart of the work

Without a design approach, you could end up only driving out efficiencies, leaving a pre-internet age service in place, albeit a cheaper one to run. Sometimes that’s ok – don’t forget this is urgent, real world work. But you can expect to drive out efficiencies as a by-product of the service design approach to digital change, and this is the right way to go. Digital service design is about rethinking the operating model in the light of the internet. It ensures users get services they like using, and helps disrupt who creates value in a service (i.e. customers and communities doing more). In Adur and Worthing, we have further to travel down this road for sure, but we’re working on it. We are building in-house capacity for service design and moving the team into a space where we can create a lab type environment, in a low key kind of way.

The digital strategy should meet the needs of elected members (they represent citizens and committees approve programmes)

There are two aspects to this. Members want residents to have a good experience of council services, and to maintain or improve service levels while revenue support grant reduces year on year. Services must be efficient and responsive, and the digital programme must deliver returns in cost savings and improved customer experience. Some members may not quite see the need to invest in digital services, and may for example be (too) concerned about the digital inclusion issue. The narrative has to be about staying relevant , protecting front line services and improving customer experience.

The other area here is members’ experience of council IT, which is often poor. A good, balanced digital strategy will think about the basic needs of users and provide solutions to common frustrations .. for example providing email, calendar and document access to any device as we have done at A&W with the rollout of Google for Work.

IT spend controls should be put in place and contracts examined for opportunities to exit legacy systems

We heard in the session from folk who struggle to control the purchasing of departments that hold their own IT budgets. IT budgets must be centralized and governance put in place. At A&W we have a Digital Design Authority that assesses and makes recommendations up to the Digital Programme Board for approval. Renewals are sometimes allowed (this is the real world) but we aim to renew on a 1+1 basis rather than lock in for longer. Some big systems remain in the architecture.

Digital programmes must deliver cashable savings

That’s what digital does when it’s done right. It cuts out human effort (.. I know it’s about other things too). We have been able to develop a clear understanding of how the digital programme fits with our medium term financial strategy, with hard targets for cashable savings. This is simply a must for any investment of public money. Digital does need to be a quite serious undertaking, at least to begin with while the point is being proved. We have a process for identifying digital savings in the annual service planning process, so we’re plugged properly into the system.

Continuous communication with key stakeholders is hugely important, and we must be responsive to people’s immediate needs

There are areas here where we could have done better to be honest, but we did grasp the nettle on a knotty problem and negotiate an early exit from our enterprise telephony provider, and this sort of thing helps the reputation of the overall programme. At A&W we do as much as we can to improve day-to-day IT delivery, ordering WAN connections, fixing network and hosting issues etc. But there is a balance here – business as usual is a full-time job, so to make progress you have to create the space for the new stuff – those calls are sometimes difficult and can be unpopular for very understandable reasons.

There’s nothing quite like a crisis ..

Most existing council software applications have process inefficiency hard-wired in, and the inflexibility of systems kills the innovation of staff and managers’ abilities to respond to the needs of their customers. Because of this, I think everyone can build a narrative that is pretty much a crisis story. You just need to quantify the waste, perhaps by doing some analysis in a couple of areas and producing some numbers.

When I started in May 2014 there was an air of desperation about an unreliable IT infrastructure (system outages) and there had been a lack of leadership and strategy. This did give us an audience keen for direction, focus and effort. Of course, in this situation the first steps you take are pretty vital because you have to secure people’s confidence! My strategy was to produce a first committee report that was an honest “all is not well ..” piece, which people appreciated and set a different tone – they felt they were being heard. I should say the IT infrastructure, provided through an ICT partnership we have with Horsham and Mid Sussex Councils, has recently improved with the help of a new leader there.

One unit should have the change function and all of IT (digital projects, service design, applications, infrastructure)

In the autumn as part of a “tier 3” restructure exercise, I created a role “Head of Digital & Design”. This role, occupied by the fabulous thinker, do-er and joker Dave Briggs, has control of the whole IT budget and strategy. Our digital programme is not a “special project” outside IT somewhere. It’s core enterprise business. And whilst change leadership can and must be distributed across the organisation, IT must be design-led, those skills and approaches are critical requirements in the team.

Identify and encourage the people who are up for it

No project can survive long without its supporters, so seek them out and give them a role in the change. Having digital champions around the business, as we do, gives us a culture change capability as well as a fantastic training resource around digital skills. Their help in rolling out Google has been such a great success and we have a growing army of disruptors and do-ers in the organisation, using the Google tools to create new, more collaborative ways to work.

Thanks to Valerie Pearce and Ian McGraffin so far for their feedback which has helped improve this. I will keep tinkering with this, so more feedback welcome.

Many thanks to Jonathan Flowers for his blog post earlier, which was most kind as well as interesting

Mmm, not got enough time for this post, but.. I wanted to suggest a topic for localgovcamp, the event for digital and design practitioners in and around local government. It’s in Leeds on Sept 12th and you can grab a free ticket here. There are also two fringe events on the Friday by many lovely folk.

Apart from working out what to do and why (see Dave Briggs’ post on government as a platform and go to his session), I’ve long been wrestling with the problem of how to make it happen. Well, how to make anything happen to be honest!

I’m thinking mainly about the tools here (digital tech) rather than the method (design thinking) because I think the former is a necessary (pre) condition, and the latter is relatively easy to achieve once the tools are there, but we can talk about that ..

There are a few things I’d like to explore

understanding your organisation and whether you should stay

articulating the value of digital (the sector has a problem here)

what the Chief Executive needs to know and do

knowing and thinking about your audiences, especially decision makers

developing a balanced strategy to meet a range of stakeholder needs – what we did at A&W

recognising this is a 3-5 year project and true disruption does not come until about year 3

dealing with pessimism and resistance

working out when to give up and try something else – different routes up the hill

Back in May 2014 last year, I started at Adur and Worthing Councils as Director for Digital & Resources. Since then, we’ve developed a government as a platform approach and introduced a range of new technologies that are helping us build true end-to-end digital services, switch off legacy applications and deliver savings by removing administrative tasks. We moved everyone over to Google for mail / productivity last April and we’re dishing out smartphones at the moment (important stuff). We’ve already redesigned and moved our waste and recycling service onto the platform and will soon de-commission the legacy system. We plan to move on to Housing in the autumn.

I’ll be honest, I’m worried we’re a bit of a freak of happy coincidences so I want to see if there’s a formula we can extract out of this and your experience that might be useful to the sector as a whole.

By the way – have you seen the SOLACE agenda? Now there’s an audience that needs to think about Gaap and digital business models ……

Today was a good day. The first 9 people began their training on Matssoft, the low code platform we have selected to enable us to rapidly design and build digital services. It was so fantastic to see not just folk from our new Digital & Design team but also folk from service areas learning how to design and build applications. I kept thinking about how virally the news will spread across the business about the value of our new internet-based technologies. About all the meetings where people will start to say “you could create a Google community to help with that” or “we could build a Mats process to handle that”. Today was great!

Tomorrow will be good too. Dave Briggs starts as our Head of Digital & Design.

Our day starts by reviewing our newly architected platform (a nicely interoperable combo of Saleforce and Matssoft) with the first products on it, namely contact centre and “green bins”. I’m always checking back on decisions and priorities in my mind and I still think we’ve done a great job of focussing on the technology foundations, working with Methods Digital, so that we are able to make rapid progress as we create the Digital & Design team, with users at the centre of everything we do.

I can’t wait for the next phase as we develop a user-centred design methodology utilising all the great stuff from GDS, Open Policy Lab, Design Council and all the brilliant agencies in that space like IDEO, Engine, Futuregov and so on. We are going to build the capabilities needed to radically re-design services, end-to-end by working directly with users. We are going to develop a service that encourages incumbent service models to be disrupted, and for innovation to come from the outside in as much as possible. We’re not just going to “improve” our existing services, although that will be very much where we start, as I see this as a 2-3 year process of learning and deep change in our patterns of thinking and doing.

We still have a few more foundations to lay over the next three months. We are assessing our wifi this week and intend to install excellent public access in all our buildings. We’re also going to be rolling out smartphones to pretty much everyone and taking most of the desk phones away. By June, new enterprise telephony will be accessed from within Google in the browser, and through an app on either corporate or personal mobiles. We have a BYOD policy already in place.

Even though this is a lot of stuff, I’ve learned that people respond brilliantly when the value is so clear. When the technology is so reliable and easy to use, the project risks are much lower than people fear.

One of my guiding principles is that digital & design is for everyone, and must be BY everyone. I’m proud to have kept that in mind as we implement government as a platform at Adur and Worthing, ensuring that we are introducing new technology to all staff rather than only worrying about the longer term citizen platform stuff.

I’m delighted that as a group of people we have ‘gone for it’ at this pace, working on infrastructure, devices, data and software all together. Now for people capabilities .. design thinking and culture change.

As Martha Lane Fox said last night about digital in the UK: “We’re going too slow, being too incremental. We need to be bolder.” We’re being bold in Adur & Worthing. I encourage YOU to be bold, or move to somewhere that will let you be!

This has been urgent for some time – see my earlier post on the need for radical redesign. Changing out your technology in a radical way is, I believe, an essential starting point.

We’re taking another big step forward today at Adur and Worthing Councils with the announcement that Dave Briggs will join us as Head of Digital and Design. A leading figure nationally in digital government, Dave will build a new Digital and Design Service to drive forward our digital programme here on the south coast.

How exciting !!!!

Over the last six months we have been focussed on selecting best of breed technologies, ensuring we have the right tools for the job. The next stage is creating a great in-house team of people who can deliver service re-design, technology and change management. It is extremely rare to find people who can do all three things well, and Dave is one of them. I can’t think of a better person to take forward the next phase of our work as we continue to build the capabilities we need to make true digital local government a reality.

Dave’s career in government took him from the benefits office at a Norfolk borough council to 10 Downing Street in four years. He was one of the first blogging local government officers and founded the influential LocalGovCamp series of informal conferences for innovators in the sector.

In recent years he has been working as an independent consultant with various councils and government departments, helping them prepare their digital strategies and develop their working cultures to make the most of the opportunities technology provides.

With Dave joining us, and the fundamental technology change we have already begun, I believe we can make a fantastic impact on our Council’s agenda to deliver for customers, communities and businesses.

I’m absolutely thrilled with how much work we’ve managed to get done here at Adur & Worthing Councils on digital strategy and delivery. This post explains what we’ve been doing, why and what’s coming up next. The Digital & Design Service is being set up in April (exciting leadership announcement coming soon ..) and along with it a dedicated public blog.

Before I give an outline of the work we’ve been doing, I wanted to set out a few thoughts and ideas to help frame things.

Vision&Principles

In advance of publishing anything official, which we soon will, here are some thoughts about what we might say to set the scene.

We will make our Councils really easy to interact with digitally. Our old IT systems have been holding us all back, and we will replace them with modern, secure, internet-based services that mean we can make simple, elegant, end-to-end digital services a reality to the benefit of our citizens.

Our staff need better work processes, software and devices to do their jobs well and to remove inefficiency. We will use user-centred design principles to radically re-shape and simplify services, improving team collaboration through technology, and enabling people to work from any location using modern devices.

Becoming very capable at digital and design, the Councils will develop their role as leaders and conveners in Adur & Worthing and further afield, helping to address future public service and civic challenges by harnessing the wider capabilities and assets of our system: partners, communities, citizens and businesses.

We will be publishing a ‘living’ Digital Road Map for Adur & Worthing over the next few months. We’ll start with some initial ideas, goals and projects and take time to engage with partners, communities, citizens and businesses, with the aim of building a network of people and groups that will help build our digital future.

Capabilities

We’re talking a lot about capabilities at the moment as we shape our thinking with the help of the folk at Methods Digital. Capabilities is a concept that makes sense for both technology and people. It’s a really powerful way to think about things.

We developed our technology strategy recently by looking at our business capability needs; things like the ability for a customer to make a booking, or a payment. We will be moving away from our legacy line of business systems that duplicate these capabilities across the business and maintain the silos and fragmented customer experience. More details on that further down this post.

But we also want to look hard at the new ‘people capabilities’ for public services; we must develop new skills and approaches like design thinking, digital skills, commerciality, working in the open and taking a more risk-based approach.

It’s widely accepted that local government will increasingly become a facilitator, commissioner and curator, but this only really happens in my view as we break up the old patterns and build new capabilities through fundamental technology change and service re-design. Technology is so instrumental to the way we work and modern platforms give us new possibilities about how services can be delivered. This is why digital is so compelling – if we are brave and get this right, by adopting the right kinds of technologies, we will create possibilities for deep change in public service organisations, helping rethink and rewire the system.

What the sector should definitely collaborate on: 240v or Lego Government

I’m really up for sector collaboration, but it’s actually really hard to make it work and I think there are some really major, structural and natural human barriers. But there are some fundamentals that the sector must collaborate on in order to market-make. New public service innovators need to know they can sell their services to any public service organisation (let’s start with local authorities!), and this requires us to look at making ourselves the same ‘shape’.

Government in the future will, I think, rely on set of curated and supported capabilities that are available to a range of familiar and new providers operating more platform-based business models, allowing for much more creative co-production. For example, MK:Data Hub are creating a civic data capability for the Milton Keynes, which will provide a platform for SMEs to plug into and develop applications for a “Smart” city.

Following the logic mapped out in “Digitizing Government”, I like to think about this as “240v government” or “Government as Lego”. Government needs to create/adopt a set of platforms and standards that citizens and service providers can more easily plug into digitally. Different technologies can happily co-exist (we don’t need to use the same tech) as long as they are interoperable. Lego pieces are different shapes and sizes but use standards that mean they always can be fitted together, giving massive flexibility, scope for innovation and allowing a network of service providers to still give seamless experiences to end users). The 240v standard for domestic electricity means manufacturers can make electrical products knowing they will work in homes anywhere in the UK. That’s a powerful principle and an essential model if we are to create a new market for public service innovation that delivers outcomes differently and at lower cost.

So a key question for public services is: what are the 240v or Lego standards that we need to build, so creating the conditions for future service providers to confidently bring products to market?

That’s a crucial thing for local government to think about and prioritise as a sector. Let’s not start with the Local Government Digital Service argument! You can imagine the future commissioner’s simple specification: We operate on 240v, do you? We need agreed open data and technology standards. To talk about collaboration further up the food chain, such as business processes or single technologies, is the wrong place to start for our complicated system.

Capable People

For us, in our new Digital & Design service at Adur and Worthing, we will place an increasing emphasis on digital and design capabilities / skills. Not just for our D&D staff, but through developing a programme of ‘learning by doing’ for all staff and, increasingly, other stakeholders. I want the technology stuff to gradually move into the background as we adopt a thoroughly user-centred, not tech-centred design approach. We will develop a confidence, knowing what our tech capabilities are when designing and be able to bring technology to bear when it’s appropriate.

So all that having been said, my focus and obsession in the job has been this: Where do we start?

Building Blocks and Being Practical

When I arrived at Adur & Worthing in May 2014, it was clear we had a very traditional set up, albeit with some really good practice in our web team (we’ve had four stars in the Better Connected report for years). There was still a lot to do.

From May-July I did my own discovery work and the first priorities were very clear: network outages, disaster recovery processes and telephones, all of which we had significant problems with. I got specialists in to help with DR and worked with our IT colleagues (our infrastructure service is provided in a partnership with two other councils) to stabilize the network. I also worked with the telephony supplier, recently agreeing to part company. I began to look for a specialist technology partner to help me flesh out what I knew we must do: to move the whole organisation to new open, cloud-based technologies. I had been involved in innovative digital projects before which were incredibly challenging to establish in the councils I worked in. They had tended to “bounce off” after expending a lot of energy! I knew something deeper and more fundamental needed doing with council IT. The ‘monolith’ as I call it, needed moving. Through my network of contacts, I discovered James Herbert, Mark Thompson and their company Methods Digital.

So, in July 2014, I wrote a report for Committee that outlined the issues I’d found and what we needed to do next, securing funding to partner with Methods Digital for technology discovery and then blueprinting, taking us to an investment case for significant funding, successfully made to Committee in December. We worked really hard with the timing of the work and reports to ensure we kept a really good pace going and Methods started implementation with us on site in early January 2015, just six months after the first Committee report.

So, what have we decided to do?

We have established three key strands to the programme: productivity (email/office), platform (multi-channel engagement & end-to-end self-service) and telephony (fixed and mobile). Design, agile and open principles are core to the approach.

In the autumn we developed a capability map, and a target platform-based architecture. I was initially very keen to look at open source options for the new platforms, but it quickly became clear that we could make more rapid progress if we looked at selecting enterprise cloud platforms with great capabilities, their own ecosystems and open APIs. I learned that open standards were the important part. As a small authority, the other critical feature for me was always having platforms that we could build on cost effectively and rapidly, making sure not to find ourselves caught out for professional services costs in the long run.

We are very much at the beginning of this work, but I think we have made some exciting product selections:

Google for Work (already soft-launched)

Salesforce (for the contact centre)

Low code business process platform for the whole business

Cloud telephony (selection being finalized)

Android mobiles (tender out soon)

Our “Citizen Interaction Platform” (CIM) is a tightly integrated combination of Salesforce and the low code platform, providing us with a powerful but cost-effective platform to build on. Methods got the two products ‘talking’ last week and we’re all very excited about it!

Our first digital product on the CIM will be a “green bins” ordering service, allowing us to establish some core capabilities on the platform. Our aim is to then replace our first legacy ICT system (by June we think) by going on to digitize bulky waste, clinical waste etc. We expect to be able to increase momentum in the programme as our capabilities are established both in terms of the platform technologies and our people. We have 18 staff (mostly people with business analysis skills, rather than programming skills) being trained on the low code platform in April.

Importantly, we will also be doing a lot of work soon to create the “Design” part of our service and will be recruiting an experienced “Service Designer” to the team. I will very soon announcing who will set up and lead our new Digital & Design Service. This will be a huge step for us, because we know that our success will be built around very talented and committed people using great technologies but with user-centred design at the front and centre. We will introducing a new ‘people’ work strand around digital and design capability which will be very exciting and hugely important.

We already have some talented and energetic folk at Adur & Worthing and I’m really excited to see what they will do with the help of these new people and capabilities we are bringing in.

It was my first time at a Solace annual conference, and I’ll be back again. It felt like many more people are ready to think about radical public service solutions and deeper civic engagement – there was a sense of real receptivity to what some of the leading authorities are saying and doing. David McNulty, CEO for Surrey County Council, did a particularly good presentation on the work he’s leading across Surrey which asks staff (with the help of coaching) to step up and contribute to rethinking and redesigning how local government can design services differently: designing with users, designing for outcomes, and recognising the networked and platform-based future of service delivery. It’s great how wide he is taking this, seeking to get “design” into the organisational DNA, rather than it being the preserve of a special team.

Being now Director for Digital & Resources at Adur and Worthing Councils, I was keen to get a sense of how senior leaders are thinking about technology strategy. After all, the shoals of fish, to use David McNulty’s phrase (networks of people delivering service, consuming service and sharing information), need digital platforms as the water to swim in.

Platform thinking

For me, over the last few years and with very few exceptions, local government has failed to use digital to disrupt current service models. We need to see councils transforming into (or commissioning) platform businesses using technology .. think Blockbusters>Netflix, Waterstones>Amazon, Hotels>Airbnb, Black cabs>Uber, HMV>Spotify. Yes, this is about radical thinking and great design – but what was the water those start up businesses swam in? What allowed them to think differently, to innovate? ….. it was the possibility tof creating platform businesses using the internet. Have a read of this article on “pipes vs platforms“.

What’s stopping even those who “get” this and want to see new innovative service models emerging, is our IT estate and how we hold and use our data. Our IT is generally hosted locally, but much more importantly our IT estate is made up of large proprietary databases sitting inside our vertical silos that were built by digitizing paper-based and BVPI (remember those?) driven processes. Even the rightly lauded Government Digital Service has had to work around the edges of the monstrous carbuncles of government IT estates, grown up over decades and being maintained by hard-working IT professionals who just have not been given sufficient leadership and resource.

Over the last few years we have seen a genuine alternative model emerging as secure, enterprise-grade platform services have become available. It is now possible, and I think vital, to move away from the constraints of our current IT set ups. Only then can we create and consume the platform-based services we need.

As a sector we’re still not doing the strategic work on IT, security and data standards that would help liberate us all. We’re still not accepting that we are making do (and remaining stuck) with expensive LEGACY IT arrangements that are proprietary and closed. Things are definitely shifting in some places (Bristol, Kingston & Sutton, Monmouthshire, Hounslow) but I do rather think a strategic working group for the sector would help bring together some very useful principles and strategic choices ..

Let me highlight some other sticking points:

we don’t understand the total cost of ownership of our current way of working, including the inefficient processes. The investment case *is* there!

we need capability around developing platform strategy and agile design/build. We don’t have that generally

we think everything has to be delivered within the Public Service Network (PSN) – No! just ask Cabinet Office who are moving to Google for Work

all data is treated as requiring the highest levels of security protection – Wrong! It’s expensive and is preventing proper use of commodity services provided via “the internet”!

IT departments too often see cloud/platform as a threat rather than an opportunity to be re-born. Leadership required!

we still focus on the presentation layer, the website, and forget about the expensive, broken customer journey waiting for users just a click or two away

This stuff is important .. it’s preventing us from changing fast enough….

Tribes

I’m really keen on Catherine Howe’s 7 Tribes of Digital which she talked about in a conference session on Digital Leadership:

7 Tribes of Digital (from Catherine Howe)

I feel in my role I have a responsibility to “be” all of these and to encourage all tribes to come forward as I spot them in my organisation. But it’s kind of dangerous to encourage people without taking some bigger steps to remove the impediments as fast as possible. It is a bad idea to get people excited and come up with ideas for digitally-powered services only for them to get the “Uh-Uhhhh” Mr Babbage noise: “you can’t do that”.

Adur and Worthing are undertaking a technology blueprinting exercise right now looking at productivity, platform and infrastructure – to tackle the impediments, with the help of Methods Digital. We’re also doing a lot of research on security, which is absolutely vital. We’re exploring the investment case for a serious programme to migrate away from the legacy, creating a tech selection process based on business capabilities and open standards. We are also looking to bring together a team internally to take “design and digital” forward. We aim to create the conditions for rapid deployment of end-to-end digital customer services, and we will go on to work with others to co-produce a wider digital road map for the “place” to help play a shaping role in wider social innovation and economic growth.

My tribe is actually social innovation. But I’m in “digital architecture” right now because that will give everyone at Adur and Worthing the means to design great services and adopt the best innovation SMEs and other councils can throw at us.

If anyone fancies a chat about what we’re doing, please do contact me @pdbrewer

A good session was had at UKGovcamp on developing local capacity for innovation. We had some very experienced folk in the room which allowed us to see ways through all the challenges and barriers!

There are a number of features to the discussion worth covering, but as a headline we achieved the central UKGovcamp goal – found people of common interest and a way to continue the conversation and learning at the Open Policy Making UK Linkedin Group.

Hidden Treasures

As we talked it was clear that there are some really interesting examples of local innovation that are not visible enough. We need to be better at highlighting the work that we do and look to create an open resource for people to draw on. From small but powerful ideas like a ‘you have permission’ letter from the Chief Executive to hand out to staff when they express reservations, to writing up whole case studies or sharing toolkits. We can talk more about the practicalities in the Linkedin Group.

Please do post others to the Linkedin Group. They can be individual projects as well of course that have something interesting to say about our ability to innovate.

The Language we use

One feature of our discussion was around the language we use and we agreed, I think, that talking about “innovation” is very likely to be counter-productive as we seek to share a way of working with people. Andrea Siodmok (@designcomedy), who was Chief Design Officer at Cornwall County Council for a couple of years, suggested we instead talk about “making good ideas happen”. This is a great way to capture not just the need to design well, but also the need to implement successfully.

Stories from the new world

How do we show what these “good ideas”, developed from a true understanding of user need and context, are like? How do we make it clear that new groups of people using design methods can deliver the radical solutions that are needed? We tell stories, Andrea suggests. Like the one about a village’s response to the withdrawal of the rural bus service. They decided to paint a cross on the pavement by the bus stop. Anyone passing by seeing someone standing on the cross could pick them up and take them into town for a £2.50 fare.

Leadership

We heard a difficult story from a county council about their rural transport project that eventually ran aground because of a lack of senior leadership. And we had a couple of examples where even with Chief Executive support, the body of the organisation can easily resist the “fad” unless a thoughtful and realistic long-term strategy is developed.

Giles Gibson talked about the importance of stress testing here, which was all about making sure enough of the right conditions are present before embarking. Many of us will know how wasteful and draining it can be to be knocking on the wrong door. But I hope Giles can help us explore that more on the Linkedin Group, because we need to learn how to work with people to get things off the ground.

Design thinking

I think we were clear that a design approach is the way to do this stuff, that takes us from discovery, through definition and development, to delivery. The graphic below usefully illustrates how parts of the process are divergent (open) and others convergent (controlled). Read more here.

There are plenty of examples of where design thinking is being used in the public sector, or starting to be. Here are some useful links

We talked quite a bit about whether setting up a dedicated “innovation hub” – a physical space inside the council, say – was the way to go. The difficulty with this we thought was that they are susceptible to being seen as very visibly “Other” to the mainstream and may set up a counter-productive “them” and “us” divide within the organisation. We need good innovation work to be happening widely. Esko Reinikainen talked about the work in Monmouthshire to teach cohorts of staff new skills and Andrea talked about how in Cornwall, design and project toolkits were written up, incorporating the best of existing methods (including PRINCE2!) to form a “new way of doing things” that has been embedded into all the transformation work they do. The Head of Transformation was mentored by Andrea from the beginning, making the whole effort THEIRS, not something shipped in that would evaporate when the design consultants (or indeed the supportive Chief Executive) left. Andrea talked about her Book of Nothing initiative:A blank notebook was passed around inside and outside the council asking people to hand-write their idea of “what is innovation?”, starting with the Chief Executive and including (after much harrying and chasing), a visiting Nick Clegg. This became a very powerful shared symbol of broad commitment and understanding, with each new writer being influenced by previous scribes. This is very powerful cultural change work – absolutely aimed at encouraging everyone to participate, think for themselves and use their own language.

Catalyse the change, don’t be the change.

Maybe every council will have a Chief Design Officer at some point fairly soon to help imbue the organisation with the design approach? Toolkits, open collaboration on projects, mentoring, learning by doing.

Where are the opportunities?

It’s really important to have enough space to create good ideas in. Cornwall called it “thinking room”. When the pressure’s on, there’s not enough time to do the work properly and we’ve all seen service user “consultation” be paid lip service in the rush to solve immediate commissioning and budget challenges. So Andrea talked about “getting ahead of the problem”. I’ve not spoken to them, but it seems to me SILK’s focus on designing for dementia is a good example here. Certainly that’s the kind of big issue that deserves deep work to get the right kind of change in place for the long term. What are the other biggies, and can we forge collaborations on these between local agencies or between councils etc – sharing resources and skills?

We also talked about the opportunities to re-use service designs and digital platforms that have been created elsewhere. We remarked how common it is for people to resist “copying” others – opportunities to be praised as innovators and creators will be missed! Nesta’s Creative Councils 10 Lessons report has an interesting point (5) on a role they call the public service developer: “These people don’t innovate from scratch but instead work out how to match ideas with great potential to sources of investment, new business models and the people who can make them work”.

With huge thanks to the wonderfully open sharing from folk in the session. I learnt loads, hope others did too.